Summer’11 Release optimizes forecast and pipeline management process for larger sales organizations

Redwood City, Calif., June 16, 2011

News Facts

Cloud9, the leader in on-demand sales forecasting and pipeline management solutions, announced today its Cloud9 Summer’11 Release. This semi-annual release specifically addresses the unique forecast and pipeline management process challenges faced by larger sales organizations. Sales operations personnel now will have the ability to pre-configure and organize forecast and pipeline views that they then can share with groups or individual sales leaders, sales reps or sales analysts through the Cloud9 application tab in Salesforce CRM.

The result is that Sales Operations gains more control over defining and managing the forecast and pipeline management process, while sales leaders and sales reps enjoy a simplified user experience that minimizes the effort to find answers related to their forecast and opportunity pipeline questions. For larger, global sales organizations these new Cloud9 features provide a scalable solution to maintaining a highly efficient forecasting and pipeline management process.

Simplified User Experience

The Summer’11 Release makes Cloud9’s core forecasting and pipeline ”what’s changed” features more accessible to non-technical sales leaders and sales reps. Now, when users select the Cloud9 tab in Salesforce CRM, they see a homepage that presents pre-configured bookmarks that link to answers to commonly asked forecasting and pipeline management questions. These bookmarks can be arranged according to their sales organization’s forecasting and pipeline management cadence to focus the sales organization on the most relevant activities at various points during the week, month or quarter. Clicking on a bookmark takes the user to a pre-configured view of Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator, Cloud9 Dashboards or Cloud9 Commitments. To enhance the user’s experience, bookmarks are coded as New, Favorite and Updated.

Increased Administrator Control

The new release introduces an Administrator Console that allows an application administrator to pre-configure, organize and share views of Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator and Cloud9 Dashboards. This benefits non-technical sales leaders, sales reps and business analysts by eliminating the duplication of effort involved with large numbers of user individually defining the same view and supports the dissemination of forecasting and pipeline management best practices throughout the sales organization.

Caching Queries

To provide maximum response to large numbers of queries requested by larger sales organizations, the Summer’11 Release adds persistent cache technology that extends system cache to virtual memory stored on high-speed disk drives. This eliminates the need to discard queries made by one user that may be useful to another user between data warehouse refreshes.

In addition, this release adds a new feature that “warms up” frequently requested queries after each (typically nightly) refresh, to minimize query processing time.

Supporting Quotes

“Cloud9’s Summer’11 Release offers larger sales organizations the means to achieve an entirely new level of forecasting and pipeline management process excellence,” said Neil Mendelson, vice president of products at Cloud9. “This latest release addresses our customers’ desire to share their best practices across the entire sales organization, enabling all users to gain insight and take action at the appropriate time throughout their sales cadence.”

Availability

Cloud9 Summer’11 release will be available in July.

About Cloud9

Cloud9 is the global leader in on-demand sales forecasting and pipeline management solutions for Salesforce CRM. Cloud9 delivers these revenue performance management applications directly to line–of–business users to dramatically improve the predictability of their sales forecasts, the effectiveness of their one-on-one sales rep coaching and the productivity of their weekly sales meetings. The result is higher win rates, better CRM adoption and accelerated revenue. Cloud9 solutions deliver value in just 24 hours and require zero installation, zero maintenance and zero IT support. Cloud9 customers include EMC, Siemens, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Thomson Reuters. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, Calif. For more information, please visit http://www.cloud9analytics.com.